by Maya Angelou
I knew he had dampened the towels himself but I said nothing.
I waited two days and telephoned my mother.
She said, “Oh baby, I was going to telephone you. I’m not happy with the way my business is being run. Maybe you can help me. I’ll be back in San Francisco this weekend and I would like to come to your house on Sunday, okay?”
When Mother arrived, she said, “As the old folk say, ‘When the tabby is away, the rats will play.’ ” Her laughter held no joy.
She said, “I admit I was looking forward to coming home to see my baby and her baby, but when I heard how the rats were playing with my business, it became urgent that I come to San Francisco and right now.”
Tosh said nothing. I asked, “How bad is it?”
She said, “Not unfixable. I’ll light a fire under some butts and they’ll be happy to leave, and I’ll give a little more money to the rest and they’ll be happy to stay.”
Tosh just sat there. I asked more questions to keep the conversation going.
Mother looked at Tosh and stood up. She said, “I’ve got to go. I’ll talk to you later.”
Tosh waved a slight goodbye and I walked her to the door.
I said, “Mother …”
“I know, baby. I know he doesn’t like me. I understand. I’d feel the same about him if he wasn’t so good to you and Guy. Don’t worry, I’ll figure out a way for us to get along.” Giving me a kiss, she walked out onto the steps.
Mother gave a big party to open her house. Guy and I attended. Tosh said he had another engagement. I realized Vivian Baxter was making every effort to be friendly to him, and he had no idea what that effort cost her.
I decided to ignore the fact that they didn’t like each other, but silently I thanked my mother for her courtesy to him. Guy was doing well in school.
My job at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company gave me a salary, but no pleasure. I had stopped the dance classes at the community center and had reduced my visits to the record shop. My days consisted of work, shopping, cooking, and playing parlor games with Guy and Tosh. I still slipped off to church when I could and I went to see my mother when she had time.
One day the telephone rang. Tosh was home and he answered. His voice became curt as he said, “Sure, sure, sure,” then hung up. He came toward me and his face displayed displeasure. “That was your mother,” he said. “She wants to pick us up and take us to the beach for drinks.”
I said, “Great,” but when I looked at his face I realized he didn’t like my response. I tried to back up with “That would be nice.”
He said, “She is bringing your Aunt Lottie to pick up Guy so it will just be the three of us.”
Tosh knew he was going to be evaluated and he didn’t have to like that, but I thought he shouldn’t be surprised. Guy gladly climbed into Aunt Lottie’s car. He knew that she would feed him milk shakes and hot dogs and anything else he asked for.
My mother drove us to the bar, which overlooked the shore where seals slid over and off the rocks. We lifted glasses and toasted each other, then my mother said, “I do not want to get into your business, but I am on Maya’s side.” She turned to me and said, “Baby, can you tell me why you are so unhappy?”
Tosh looked at me expecting me to deny being unhappy, but I thought about the question and realized that for the last few months I had always been near tears.
I said, “Most of the things I like have been taken away from me.”
“Taken away or did you give them up?”
Tosh said defensively, “You said you wanted a home with a big kitchen and you have that. I am trying to be a good, faithful husband to you and a father to Guy. What else do you want?”
The two of them waited to hear what I would say and as I began to think about the dryness in my life, I couldn’t hold back the tears.
“I have no friends. Tosh is jealous even of my friendship with Yvonne. He has stopped me from studying dance, he becomes angry if I stop at the record shop, and worst of all, I have to lie when I go to church.”
Vivian exploded. “What?”
I said, “Whenever I can get away on Sunday, I go to Bailey and Yvonne’s house and put on Sunday clothes and find some church not too far away, and enjoy the service. I put money in the collection and sometimes if I’m really carried away, I will write my name down and my phone number.”
My mother’s laugh was sardonic. She said, “You mean you have to lie to go to church?”
Tosh said, “I knew about it.”
I asked, “Have you been following me?”
He denied that and added, “One evening when you were at the community center, I answered the telephone. A voice asked for Sister Antelope.”
“I told them there is no Sister Antelope here.”
The voice said, “I’m trying to reach Sister Maya Antelope. She joined church last Sunday and we have her scheduled to be baptized at the Crystal Pool Plunge on the first Sunday.”
I asked, “You decided not to tell me?”
Tosh said, “You decided not to tell me?”
My mother looked at the two of us. “Is your relationship built on lies? Maybe you want to think about that. Let’s drink up and I’ll take you home.”
Tosh asked, “Is that why you asked us out?”
“Ever since I’ve been home, I’ve seen that Maya has been sad enough to break down and cry. Now I understand.”
Tosh asked, “And how can you fix that? Whose butt will you light a fire under?”
She said, “Are you ready? I’ll pay the check.”
Tosh said, “We’ll call a cab.”
I started to get up and follow her, but she said, “No, baby, you do what your husband wants you to do. But you have to think about the place that you are in.”
I sat back down with Tosh as she walked to the cashier.
19
Mother and I were having coffee at the kitchen table when Tosh and seven-year-old Guy came in from a basketball game. I had prepared dinner and set the table. Mother told me she had an appointment so she wouldn’t be staying. She greeted Tosh and Guy and said she’d like to take us out to dinner on Saturday night. She knew a Russian restaurant that served borscht and beef stroganoff. She was sure we would enjoy it.
Tosh thanked her for the invite but said he couldn’t come. The tone of his voice told her he didn’t want to come. My mother gave him a brisk “Okeydokey.” She then gave me and Guy a kiss and left.
I asked, “Tosh, why can’t you come to dinner—what will you be doing?”
“I think we’re seeing too much of your mother.”
I didn’t respond because I didn’t want to argue in front of Guy. That was not the whole truth. The whole truth was I didn’t know what to say.
Guy and I went to dinner at the Russian restaurant and my mother never mentioned Tosh, but he was very present in his absence.
Guy asked, “Why didn’t Dad come to dinner?”
My mother looked at him and at me, then asked, “When did Tosh start becoming his dad?”
I said, “They both decided.”
“I see” (which meant she didn’t see).
The light in my marriage waned as the sun sets in the western sky. At first the dimness is hardly noticeable, then noticeable but not alarming. Then with a rush, the light is vanquished by darkness. I realized I had lost interest in the marriage when I no longer wanted intimacy with my husband and no longer had concern about cooking exquisite meals. When music lost its talent to lighten my mood, I had to admit that what I wanted, I did not have. I wanted an apartment for myself and my son.
Tosh told me he understood when I explained that I missed my friends, the dance classes, and the freedom to mention God, Jesus, and faith without having a knock-down, drag-out argument. I disliked that he forced me to defend my basic beliefs.
Tosh took my departure with such equanimity that I believe he was as relieved as I that our marriage had ended.
Guy was devastated at the news of our brea
kup and he blamed me. He remained angry for about a year and I found it impossible to explain to him that we had worn the marriage out. Bailey found it hard to understand why I had left the security of married life.
He thought he knew what I should have done. “All you had to do was make friends with Tosh’s friends or bring people into your life and convince Tosh that they were his friends first.”
Those were not solutions I was able to use.
Guy continued being distraught. Divorce in a family when the parents have been married a child’s whole life can be painful. However, when the marriage is only three years old and the child has found his first father after four years of having none, divorce is a horror. At his young age, Guy thought that at last he could be like other children. At last he had a mother and a father who lived in the same house. At last he had someone who would answer out loud when he called “Dad.”
After the separation we moved into a small two-bedroom apartment. My son cried himself to sleep so often and so piteously that I, too, wept alone in my bedroom.
I reported our situation to my mother, who never reminded me that she had said it wouldn’t work out.
“It is normal,” she said. “And although it is painful, imagine if you had allowed Tosh to take the sense of your person away. Guy would have lost the person he needs the most, his mother. For the sake of yourself, you must preserve yourself and for the sake of Guy, you must preserve his mother.”
I looked for work, resumed dance class, and reestablished my friendships at the Melrose Record Shop. My life was still teetering, and I was still searching for an even balance.
20
Nina (pronounced NINE-nah) was a strip-tease dancer I had met in the dance class. She told me that she wanted to be a serious dancer. In the meantime, she made $300 a week stripping in a nightclub. She heard that my marriage had ended and that I was job hunting. She suggested that I try out at the club where she worked. I sat in the dark rear of the Bonne Nuit Dance Club and watched the women one after another enter the stage and glide across the floor, taking off pieces of apparel and making suggestive movements with their hips and breasts. They stopped after the brassieres were removed, leaving the nipples covered with sequins. They patted their sequined g-strings. They bowed to the loud and mostly male audience and left the stage.
Because doing the strip-tease for me would be as easy as chewing gum, I thought I should not refuse an offer for a job out of hand. I knew I didn’t want to be known as a strip-tease dancer, but the prospect of three hundred dollars per week was also tantalizing. I called my mother and told her my dilemma.
She came to my new apartment. She said, “Let me make you a costume and you choreograph a dance. If you take a theme like Scheherazade, the Sultan’s wife, you can use the music of Duke Ellington, ‘Night in Morocco.’ Understand if you are not going to take off your costume, what you wear will have to be so skimpy that the audience will be satisfied since they will be seeing nearly all of you. And there is this: You will not be posing onstage as you disrobe. You have to really be dancing.”
Mother and I went to a theatrical costume shop. I bought g-strings and gauzy brassieres. We bought coke feathers, sequins, and bugle beads. My mother knew only a little more than I about sewing. We crowded the sequins, beads, and feathers onto the g-string and the brassiere.
I hired a conga drummer named Roy who played for the dance classes at the community center. I prepared for an audience at the Bonne Nuit Dance Club. Backstage I stripped and lathered my body with Max Factor #9 body makeup. I had no scars but the makeup made me feel theatrical. I put on the skimpy costume. Roy sat on a stool on the stage and at a cue, he began to play the conga drums.
Barefoot and nearly naked, I shouted, “Caravan!” and hit the floor. I began to dance sensuously, sultrily, and slowly. I allowed the music to pull me across the floor. I picked up the tempo and danced faster. Again I shouted, “Caravan!” I danced faster, shimmying and shaking and quivering. I slowed down. I had danced about ten minutes and slowed down again and again and returned to the slow, sensuous shimmer. In a large stage whisper, I said, “Caravan,” and walked off the stage.
The owner gave me the job. He asked, “What is your name?”
I said, “Rita, the Dancing Señorita.”
When I reported the outcome to my mother, she was pleased. She said, “I am not surprised. You are going far in this world, baby, because you dare to risk everything. That’s what you have to do. You are prepared to do the best you know to do. And if you don’t succeed, you also know all you have to do is try it again.”
A few popular San Francisco columnists wrote about my performances at the Bonne Nuit Dance Club. The articles revealed my tactic with the customers. Strip-tease dancers and shake dancers were expected to coerce the customers into buying them drinks, pretending the drinks they ordered contained real alcohol. But I told the customers that if they bought me a single drink, I would be served quinine water or ginger ale and that I would also be given a portion or a fraction of the money they spent, but if they bought a bottle of poor champagne, a twenty-dollar bottle, I would be given five dollars for each bottle. The columnist added that I was also unique in another way—I could really dance.
San Franciscans started to drop in to the Bonne Nuit Dance Club. They crowded the place for the fifteen minutes of my set and would offer to buy me drinks. They would order the cheap champagne and turn their backs to the strip dancers. I had neither the sophistication nor the worldliness to make them think that I was clever. A group of men with one woman became regulars. The woman had long blond hair and smoked with a cigarette holder. She spoke as I thought Tallulah Bankhead would speak and the men wore expensive but casual clothes.
They were witty and easy to talk to. It is true that they laughed at me but they laughed at themselves as well. They invited me on my night off to visit the Purple Onion, which they owned and where Jorie Remus, the blond cigarette smoker in their group, was the star.
I told them I had a seven-year-old son and I spent my night off with him. Barry Drew and Don Curry, two of the owners, said I could bring Guy along. They would seat us in a corner. I began a routine once a week. Guy and I would go to dinner in a nice restaurant, catch the show at the Purple Onion, and then go home.
San Francisco was a center for entertainers who would become world-famous. People like Mort Sahl, Barbra Streisand, Phyllis Diller, the Kingston Trio, Josh White, Ketty Lester, and Odetta were among the singers and comedians who filled the bohemian nightclubs.
One evening I had been invited to dinner at Barry Drew’s apartment. The conversation was heavy with sarcasm about folk singers.
I asked if they had heard calypso music and if they had, did they know that calypso was folk music. I reminded them that blues, spirituals, and gospel songs were all folk music. I sang a few bars of a calypso song I knew and they began to clap.
Jorie asked, “How many of those songs do you know?”
I said, “Lots.”
She asked Barry, “Do you know what I’m thinking?”
Don, Barry, and all the rest shouted, “When you go to New York City, Maya should take your place at the Purple Onion!”
They told me I would be a stunning success and to begin planning for my debut.
I talked it over with my mother.
She asked how I felt about singing.
I admitted that I was nervous and that I had only sung in church.
She asked what would happen if I flopped.
“They will fire me.”
My mother said, “They wouldn’t be getting a cherry. You were looking for a job when you got the last one, and church is still there to sing in.”
My friends brought in a coach, Lloyd Clark, to select songs and to choreograph movement for me. I rehearsed with a three-piece band and brought Guy down to every rehearsal. After four months dancing the hootchy-kootchy at the Bonne Nuit Dance Club, I opened as the star, singing calypso songs at the Purple Onion. I went from making $3
00 a week to $750 a week.
The publicity from the Purple Onion announced that the star, Maya Angelou, was a Watusi, born in Cuba, who sang calypso. My mother laughed until tears came down her cheeks. She said she never met a Watusi and had never been to Cuba, but she could swear that I was her daughter.
“I know what I’m talking about. I was there when you were born.”
On opening night my mother, Aunt Lottie, my brother, Yvonne, and some new friends were there with Guy. My nerves were shattered. My mother and I had designed my dresses and had them made by one of her friends.
Tosh had told me that his name was originally Enistasious Angelopoulos and that when Greeks shortened their names, they would give an -os ending to the boys and the females would get an -ou ending. Although Tosh and I were separated, I kept the name Angelou because I liked the sound of it.
The Purple Onion was filled. Barry Drew, in his dramatic voice, said, “And now, Miss Maya Angelou from Havana, Cuba, will sing calypso.”
Barefoot, in an exotic floor-length dress, I walked on the stage and began to sing “Run Joe.” I had sung only two lines when my son joined from the back of the room, singing off-key and loudly. My mother, brother, Yvonne, Barry, and Don all rushed to Guy. My mother put her hand over his mouth. The audience laughed and I laughed. I asked the musicians to start again.
Mother’s pride was evident. She brought her fellow members of the Women Elks Organization and the Order of the Eastern Star (African American secret women’s organizations). She brought the merchant marines with whom she sailed and they made over me as if I were Lena Horne or Pearl Bailey.
Mother said, “Now you will see some of the world and you will show the world what you are working with.” She laughed at her wit and I laughed at my imagined future.
21
A producer of Porgy and Bess telephoned me and offered me a job with the opera. He said the role of Ruby, the girlfriend of Sportin’ Life, was open and because I could sing and dance, they wanted me to play the role. I telephoned Mother and told her of the offer. The problem was that the musical was preparing to tour throughout Europe. I wanted to go but I didn’t want to leave Guy.